BY PRECARIAS
Precarias a la deriva is a collective project of investigation and action that converged in June 2002, the day of the general strike called by the major unions in Spain. In the days before the strike we came together to brainstorm an intervention which would reflect our times, aware that the labour strike, as the culminating expression of a process of struggle, was unsatisfactory for us.
There were three reasons for our discontent:
(1) for not taking up -and this is no novelty- the experience and the unjust division of domestic work and care, almost entirely done by women in the »non-productive« sphere,
(2) for the marginalization to which both the forms of action and the proposals of the strike condemn those in types of work -ever more common- which are generally lumped together as »precarious« and
(3) for not taking into consideration precarious, flexible, invisible or undervalued work, specifically that of women and/or migrants (sexual, domestic, assistance, etc.).
We saw that many of these jobs in the margins: the invisible, unregulated, unmoored jobs were in no way interrupted or altered by a strike of this type, and that the becoming precarious of the labour market had extended to such an extent that the majority of working people were not even effected by the new reforms against which the strike was directed. Therefore we tried to think of new forms of living this day of struggle by approaching and confronting these new realities. We decided to transform the classic shut-down picket into a survey-picket. Frankly, we didn't feel up to upbraiding a precarious worker contracted by the hour in a supermarket or to closing down the little convenience store run by an immigrant because, in the end, despite the many reasons to shut down and protest, who had called this strike? Who were they thinking of? Was there even a minimal interest on the part of the unions for the situation of precarious workers, immigrants, housewives? Did the shut-down stop the productive process of domestic workers, translators, designers, programmers, all those autonomous workers for whom stopping this day would do nothing but duplicate their work the next day? It seemed more interesting to us, considering the gap between the experience of work and the practice of struggle, to open a space of exchange between some of the women who were working or consuming during that day and with those who were moving in the streets. This small, discreet sketch of an investigation was the starting point for what became the project of the 'drifts'.
From the Laboratorio
That first picket-survey of June 20th, which was limited though very inspiring, gave way to a new project of interpellation based on displacement, that is to say, the possibility of preparing and carrying out a series of itineraries which would cross through the diverse metropolitan circuits of female precariousness. Thus, against the habitual division of life and work, a division long questioned by feminism, we opted for a research practice that would attend to the spatial/temporal continuum of existence and the experience of the double (or better, multiple) presence as a subjective transposition or, as the Situationists would say, as a technique of uninterrupted passage through diverse physical and psychic environments.
We decided that this drifting should be done in the first person, that is, with each one telling the others about herself, and walking together towards a prudent but sustained approximation of the differences between us. We talk, therefore, of seeking common places and, simultaneously, of singularities to strengthen. This approximation has grown through the subsequent debates which have made us modify the initial utterance »we are precarious workers« for others less prone to affirming identity as an original element and more attentive to the processes of (de)identification.
Our situations are so diverse, so partial, that it is very difficult to find common denominators from which to elaborate alliances and irreducible differences with which to mutually enrich ourselves. It is complicated for us to express ourselves, to define ourselves from the common place of precariousness; a precariousness capable of bypassing a clear collective identity through which to simplify and defend itself, but one which demands discussion. We need to communicate the lacks and the excesses of our working and living situations in order to escape from the neo-liberal fragmentation which separates and debilitates us, turning us into victims of fear, of exploitation or of the individualism of 'each one for herself.' But, above all, we want to make possible the collective construction of other lives through a shared creative struggle. Our insistence upon singularity we owe to our desire to not produce, once again, false homogeneities, without permitting that this insistence prevents us from saying anything at all. We thought, in relation to this, of the specific situation of some companions who are migrants working in domestic service and in the consequences of a link which demands other forms of commitment than those to which some of us are accustomed.
Basically it was a question of producing a cartography of the precarious work of women based on the exchange of experiences, shared reflections and the recording of all that was seen and told in an effort to materialize to the greatest extent possible -through photographs, slides, video, audio recordings and written stories- these encounters in order to communicate the results and the hypothesis which might be derived from them; a question of taking communication seriously not only as a tool for diffusion but also as a new place, a new competence and primary material for the political. Our point of departure: the occupied women's house La Eskalera Karakola, point of arrival: unknown. It is the transit that interests us now.
The Drifts
In the Situationist version of the drift, the investigators wander without any particular destination through the city, permitting that conversations, interactions and urban micro-events guide them. This permits them to establish a psycho-cartography based on the coincidences and correspondences of physical and subjective flows: exposing themselves to the gravitation and repulsion of certain spaces, to the conversations that come up along the way, and, in general, to the way in which the urban and social environments influence exchanges and attitudes. This means wandering attentive to the billboard that assaults you, the bench which attracts, the building which suffocates, the people who come and go. In our particular version, we opt to exchange the arbitrary wandering of the flaneur, so particular to the bourgeois male subject with nothing pressing to do, for a situated drift which would move through the daily spaces of each one of us, while maintaining the tactic's multi-sensorial and open character. Thus the drift is converted into a moving interview, crossed through by the collective perception of the environment.
So how do we do a drift? We depart from a few paradigmatic feminized sectors of precarious work. To begin, we chose five: domestic, telemarketing, manipulators of codes (translators, language teachers), food service (bar, restaurant), health care and identified other equally important ones for a future phase of the project: prostitution, scholarships/research, advertising, communications, social work and education. The women working in these sectors whom we asked to guide us chose a series of relevant places: their houses, workplaces, supermarkets, the park, the cyber café, the yoga class. and we threaded these spaces together as points on an itinerary loaded with significance, the networks of chance and simultaneity which compose our daily lives. Thus, following an English teacher we were able to connect -through the fortuitous tour one of her students gave us in NCR (a multinational which installs and maintains automatic bank tellers) where she teaches- the reality of the flexible work of our companion within the new factory structure, recomposed according to the demands of the global market.
The drift permits us to take the quotidian as a dimension of the political and as a source of resistances, privileging experience as an epistemological category. Experience, in this sense, is not a pre-analytic category but a central notion in understanding the warp of daily events, and, what is more, the ways in which we give meaning to our localized and incarnated quotidian. It is not exactly an observation technique; it does not aspire to 'reproduce ' or approach daily experience as it habitually occurs (an ideal of classical anthropology which has proved difficult to realize) but rather to produce simultaneous movements of approaching and distancing, visualizing and de-familiarizing, transit and narration. We are interested in the point of view of those that guide us -how they define and experience precariousness, how they organize themselves on a daily basis and what are their vital strategies in the short and the long term, what they hope for- without dismissing, in this process, the dialog and complicity which is produced in our encounter. In all these wanderings we attempt to extract common names from this dispersion of singularities -each one unknown, even alien, to the others- which comprise the new reality of precarized work. We dream of substituting, albeit just a little, the weakness of dispersion for the strength of alliances, the potential of networks. But the difficulty of both objectives comes out during the drifts. The realities of precarious work are very, very different: the resources we can count on, the emotional and material support, the wages, the rights, the social value of what we do, the diversity of availabilities and sensibilities.
We might venture a definition of the word precariousness, broad enough to acknowledge the amplitude and multidimensionality of the phenomenon, but concrete enough to avoid that the term lose all explicative force: thus we will call precariousness the juncture of conditions, both material and symbolic, which determine an uncertainty with respect to the continued access to the resources necessary for the full development of a person's life. This definition permits us to overcome the divisions between public/private and production/reproduction, and recognize and visualize the interconnections between the social and the economic which make it impossible to think about precariousness from a strictly work-and-wage perspective.
Mobility
Mobility is the quality which best describes the present malleability of the work force around the three axes: time, space and task. Mobility in the disposition of rhythms and schedules, mobility between jobs and, beyond that, in geography, in vital decisions, in lifestyle, and mobility in 'unit acts' and in the ways of developing them, always subject to mutations, to processes of evaluation and adjustment, a constant auditing. Mobility opposed to the old static forms, to bureaucratization and routine and, without a doubt, to the organizational capacity of persons who in any moment may find their functions modified and recombined, persons who don't know the limits of what they have to do, and in general, of what they themselves are.
In the past people struggled against the reification of daily life, primarily incarnated in work but also in the family and mass consumption, and this determined a change in business policies, particularly in the management of human resources. Today security and continuity have become, in name at least, increasingly precious, although the price that must be paid for them is often too high and one ends up accepting mobility and unrestricted availability in an attempt to compose a destiny which at least is not totally prescribed. The only stable element is being in perpetual transit, the »habit of the unaccustomed« which characterizes work paid by the hour, by the job, or until something better is found. Which, as our guides through the mysterious world of telemarketing commented, never really happens, such that one returns again and again to bounce off different campaigns which the virtual enterprises in the sector contract with the big communication multinationals under ever more competitive conditions.
In our drift through the social nursing sector, Carmen explained to us in detail how the lack of acceptable work opportunities in Spain and the demand for this kind of work in other countries is motivating a flow of young nurses who, besides working in their own field, aspire to learn languages and live in other places. The passage through past and present work places -a health centre in which she worked as a substitute, an attention centre for drug addicts marked by organizational chaos and lack of resources, return to the health centre, a training course for social workers of the IMEFE for which one must sign up from one day to the next - gives the sense of the sustained unpredictability within a life which besides employment -interest, security and salary - values other types of questions: the relation with others as something which is never pre-determined and as something which is esteemed in its singularity, or this idea of »the social« as a public good which extends beyond work as socialization, learning, exchange, consciousness raising, and vital context but which, as Carmen insisted when comparing her vision with that of her mother, also a social worker, one must learn to limit, to use to one's advantage. Carmen formulates the dilemma in this realm of action in her comparison of two interpretive frameworks: one as »working for the people« an attitude Carmen attributes to her mother, and the other »working for the system« a tactic she claims for herself. The distinction is important, demonstrating as it does how life is absorbed by work and work by life. 'Working for the people' one loses ones own limits with respect to work and melds one's energies and one's emotions in an exercise of continuous and committed sociability which attempts to overlook the mediation, in this case of the State, which exists in a health centre, where the privatizing tendency has skyrocketed in recent times and where the incentive system rewards a perverse model of medicalization and neglect. 'Working for the system', on the other hand, regulates this exercise of fusion by entering into a relation which emphasizes institutional mediation (though generally not from a critical perspective), supervising the link and embittering it by quitting from it the open, experimental and unlimited character of relation with others. We are also talking about the difference between a strictly medical focus, adjusted to the »viability« of health minimums, and a more social focus which is necessarily interwoven with the habits and histories of each and every one of the persons whom we see during our trip to the Alcobendas health centre.
Mobility as an existential, subjective condition constantly puts us up against an ambivalence which makes its most important effects known in the states of being uprooted, the lack of a stable identity, an unbalanced practice of flight, nostalgia and submission. We have caught a train in Atocha and once seated, we listen attentively to these reflections, previously written by one of us, as we move rapidly towards the industrial suburbs.
A rootless person is pitied or repudiated, blamed for lack of identity, roots and traditions. But to construct an identity from local cultural elements is absurd in the changing world in which we live, of dislocations, temporary habitats, migrations and mixture.
Border Territories
The second axis is the border, both in its most immediate sense -the closing of geographical borders and the precarization which this entails- as well as a more general sense of the construction of borders which determine inside access and hierarchies within much more diffuse fields, such as the house in which one works and the personal relationships which one establishes with the employers and their families. Perhaps the most vivid image of all this was offered to us by Viki, an Ecuadorian friend who works in domestic service, when she told us about the barriers which are erected in the work of in-house domestics, especially in the case of foreigners. As A.Macklin has indicated, this work is marked by a series of ambiguities which situate those who do it both inside and outside: inside the nation and outside the State, inside the economy and outside labour relations, inside the home and outside the family. The space of home and family, which in principle is a smooth surface, bit by bit reveals its strata: its forbidden places, its behaviours, its habits (in terms of food, cleaning, leisure, order, shopping, vacations, etc.) which are converted into rules, instituted in practice. The uniform, Viki explained, is the first border, that which establishes upon the body and in the eyes of others which is the place occupied by each.
Really it's very unpleasant, besides being an imposition. They don't ask you if you want to wear it or not, or how you feel, or if it looks good on you or not. Nothing. They impose it upon you at some point just to make the differentiation, or to feel better, to feel that they are above this person who has her own feelings, her own ideas, who perhaps has come to do a lot of different things, to maintain her family. they don't think about any of this, they just think in this moment that people that visit them or the family itself will see that this person is inferior, is inferior to them, nothing else.
Food -the access to certain foods or the times and places for eating- constitute another strongly gendered border territory. The rules of hospitality which reign in the household apparently guarantee equal access to the foods in the refrigerator. Nevertheless, the existing hierarchies determine ever narrower and more arbitrary limits (»Who drank the baby's juice?«). The assistant or the babysitter, like the housewife, experiences a severe dietary regime which »obliges« her to eat at fits and starts, on foot in a free moment, as if she were on a diet or picking at leftovers.
Corporealities
This places us in the terrain of productive bodies. The fusion in the body of life and work is a commonplace for many women whose work puts them in contact with the public: in commerce, hospitality and the new kind of administrative work which mixes paperwork with customer service. The desire to be appealing (to oneself and to others), a desire powerfully domesticated in women, is here recuperated for the diffuse control of labour and for the production of a subjectivity based on unconditional surrender. The feminist re-vindication of corporeal self-determination (»Our bodies, ourselves«), inspired in a vision of the colonized body and of colonization as a superimposition of layers over an original and virgin nature demands an updated reflection.
The increasing abstraction of commercial and cultural products, converted into images or lifestyles, submitted to the devices of the optical unconscious and the optical test of which Benjamin speaks, has given priority to a body in which products and attributes become inseparable. Fashion advertisements, such as those produced by Mango, show a body in which the garments are imperceptible or no more perceptible than other physical characteristics: extreme thinness, reclining and invalid posture (sometimes barely managing to stay afoot), shadowed eyes (suggesting evanescence, illness and abuse), fleshy lips (hyper-sexualization in a hypertrophic body), the empty background which helps to emphasize the body's elements.
In this way, the opportunity to make oneself a body cohabits with the corporeal proposals in which (self)discipline, be it athletic or alimentary, becomes a common denominator. Ultimately it is about beating the body, knowing how to overcome it in the face of stress, exhaustion, age, illness, depression or laziness. In this battle the first to lose are the domestic workers.
Nothing in domestic work, including care work and nursing, contributes to self-care, nothing but the capacity of the worker to endure and preserve her most necessary tool which is her own body and her integrity faced with the enormous sadness of all that which she doesn't. (»Migration - a woman in the park told us - is being far from one's land«). Free time is, definitively, time to work more. Viki's insistence on her need to feel herself treated »like a person«, like a »human being« has to do with this fabrication of submission, the reduction of her being to a mere body for the reproduction of others, pure work force unconnected to any specific quality.
Income
Income is habitually taken as the key criteria in defining precarious work, income and the condition of permanent temporariness to which we have already alluded and which we have tried to make more complex on the basis of things which have arisen during the drifts. The importance of the salary with respect to the other values such as prestige, resources, connectivity, opportunities for strategic projection or personal interests vary depending on the possibilities each person has, as an individual but more importantly as a function of one's more-or-less fixed social position. For some, like the domestic workers, the job is just this: money, that which is immediately necessary to change things, to transform »this hell of instability in which we lived.«
Income is inseparable from residency papers and the condition of being a migrant woman. Both form the closed circuit of domestic work in which many women find themselves trapped, unable to develop their professions or interests. In this circuit the servile dimension also becomes manifest, a dimension which is most clearly and materially expressed in the very form of the salary: on the one hand, the salary appears ever more the variable vulnerable to adjustment by economic policy, that is, it is the task of the salary to absorb macroeconomic shocks, the rise or fall of the moment; on the other, it is ever more individualized: the standard wage (that which is calculated in the contract and which is based on the qualification of the worker: an irreversible element) is only a small part of real wage income, whereas an increasing part is based upon the degree of implication, zeal and interest demonstrated during the process of work, that is, after the contractual moment. Thus the salary becomes less and less a result of a contractual relation (and a relation of force) and more a purely individual remuneration for services rendered.
Conflict
For us this investigation is, above all, a way of thinking together towards collective action, an effort to locate the scattered sites of conflict and know how to name them, to inaugurate other previously nonexistent ones along with those we already experience: in the process of job-seeking, in the job-interview (that grand machine of daily humiliation!), in networks, in shopping centres, on the telephone, in the park, in social centres.
The primary objective of the Laboratorio de Trabajadoras was to create a space of permanent communication which would not be restricted by work-place nor limited to the strictly work-related -as if this could be separated from other aspects of life- and that would not be restricted to the singularity of this or that company, this or that specific conflict, some particular demand, but that could be reinvented as a practice, contaminating and provoking chain reactions. A laboratory which would permit us to be on top of events and improvise coordinated movements of support and of rebellion.
Perhaps the conflict of the telephone operators struck us closest to home, especially for the absolute non-existence of representative structures, the extreme mobility (the constant shuffling of workers) and the isolation to which they are subjected, as well as some their hybrid practices of struggle in which they play with anonymity, networked action, clandestine organizational processes, the use of symbolic tools to break through isolation and fear. Their experience of communication »with whoever is beside you« in order, bit by bit, to construct a common sensibility, their necessity to recognize themselves, because the common names are not obvious, or their ability to short-circuit the company's logic producing other logics give us a few interesting hints for future interventions.
By exploring the intimate and paradoxical nature of feminized work we discovered a few points of attack: turn mobility to our advantage, appropriate the communicative channels in order to talk about other things (and not just anything), modify semiotic production in strategic moments, make care and the invisible networks of mutual support into a lever for subverting dependence, practice »the job well done« as something illicit and contrary to productivity, insist upon the practice of inhabiting, of being, a growing right.
